She sat over the fire, Willie’s hand clasped in hers.  He alone in this forlorn household loved her.  Mrs. Hurd and the other children feared and depended on her.  This creature of thistle-down—­this little thread and patch of humanity—­felt no fear of her.  It was as though his weakness divined through her harshness and unripeness those maternal and protecting powers with which her nature was in truth so richly dowered.  He confided himself to her with no misgivings.  He was at ease when she was there.

Little piteous hand!—­its touch was to her symbolic, imperative.

Eight months had she been at Mellor?  And that Marcella, who had been living and moving amid these woods and lanes all this time—­that foolish girl, delighting in new grandeurs, and flattered by Aldous Raeburn’s attentions—­that hot, ambitious person who had meant to rule a county through a husband—­what had become of her?  Up to the night of Hurd’s death sentence she had still existed in some sort, with her obligations, qualms, remorses.  But since then—­every day, every hour had been grinding, scorching her away—­fashioning in flame and fever this new Marcella who sat here, looking impatiently into another life, which should know nothing of the bonds of the old.

Ah, yes!—­her thought could distinguish between the act and the man, between the man and his class; but in her feeling all was confounded.  This awful growth of sympathy in her—­strange irony!—­had made all sympathy for Aldous Raeburn impossible to her.  Marry him?—­no! no!—­never!  But she would make it quite easy to him to give her up.  Pride should come in—­he should feel no pain in doing it.  She had in her pocket the letter she had received from him that afternoon.  She had hardly been able to read it.  Ear and heart were alike dull to it.

From time to time she probably slept in her chair.  Or else it was the perpetual rush of images and sensations through the mind that hastened the hours.  Once when the first streaks of the March dawn were showing through the curtains Minta Hurd sprang up with a loud cry: 

“Oh, my God!  Jim, Jim! Oh, no!—­take that off.  Oh, please, sir, please!  Oh, for God’s sake, sir!”

Agony struggled with sleep.  Marcella, shuddering, held and soothed her, and for a while sleep, or rather the drug in her veins, triumphed again.  For another hour or two she lay restlessly tossing from side to side, but unconscious.

Willie hardly moved all night.  Again and again Marcella held beef-tea or milk to his mouth, and tried to rouse him to take it, but she could make no impression on the passive lips; the sleeping serenity of the brow never changed.

At last, with a start, Marcella looked round and saw that the morning was fully there.  A cold light was streaming through the curtains; the fire was still glowing; but her limbs were stiff and chilled under her shawl.  She sprang up, horror descending on her.  Her shaking fingers could hardly draw out the watch in her belt.